Category Archives: Uncategorized

One part of Disneyland that most people have never seen is the apartment built for Walt's private use. But you can take an online tour of it here.

It's now been nine days since ventriloquist Rickie Layne died. The New York Sun ran a nice, detailed obit last Thursday but otherwise, I haven't seen a word anywhere on the 'net about it, apart from what I posted here last Tuesday. I assume the obituaries will be along sooner or later but I don't think this is how news reporting is supposed to work.

This weblog post by Glenn Greenwald makes a pretty clear statement of what's wrong with Bush's Iraq policy.

This Wednesday evening, PBS stations around the country are debuting Monty Python's Personal Best, a series of six one-hour specials composed of classic sketches from the original BBC Monty Python's Flying Circus. When I first heard about these, I thought it was just another way of repackaging that old material and therefore something I could miss. I love Python but I have the complete run on DVD and…well, let's just say there are some things I love but have seen too many times.

Turns out though that these specials may be worth catching. According to this article on the Python website, "Each show features a rich collection of Monty Python clips as well as new sketch material written and performed by the indvidual Pythons." Each of the five surviving performers hosts his own show and apparently they did actually pick their favorite sketches, not necessarily featuring themselves. (The Fish-Slapping Dance, which is just Palin and Cleese, is in all six shows.) They all pitched in to handle the episode spotlighting their late comrade, Graham Chapman, which is nice. But I have the feeling you could get a more entertaining show if they all just sat around and told anecdotes about him.

PBS is going to start rerunning the original Python episodes in April for the benefit, I guess, of those who love Python but not enough to buy the DVDs. It was back in 1974, of course, that PBS originally introduced Python to America…though not everywhere. For some reason, our local PBS affiliate, KCET, didn't start running them until the following year…so for a time, Monty Python had a special kind of cult following in this town. A small group of us knew their work from the records, from our trips to other cities and from the movie, And Now For Something Completely Different, which opened and closed in L.A. without a lot of attention long before KCET broadcast Python across Southern California. When they did come along though, they were an immediate hit. Almost right away, if you said "Nudge, nudge" in any public place, there'd be someone around who got the reference.

A KCET exec told me back in the seventies that Python was the third-best thing to ever happen to PBS fundraising. Reminding parents to support Sesame Street was the number one money-getter and second was to rerun the 1973 production of Steambath, which had Valerie Perrine naked for about ten seconds. Python got people to give cash, in part because Terry Jones taped a number of brilliant little pitches that KCET would run as part of their pledge breaks. They had Jones tied to a chair, looking like he'd been worked over by a couple of gorillas, pleading with us to donate or he'd endure further punishment. The exec told me that every time they ran them, they got a lot of pledges but they also got a few calls from people saying it was shameful that someone was beating up that nice man with the British accent. "We figure that's our target audience," he said. "The kind of viewer who really needs educational television."

U.S. rules shield industries from lawsuits

That's the Bush administration for you: Always watching out for the overdog.

It's been a while since I mentioned the old, black-and-white game show reruns that GSN airs in the wee, small hours of the morning. They have another five or so weeks of Beat the Clock, which can't end too soon for me. Every so often, I tune one in for about two minutes and marvel at the fact that the series was ever on the air. When those run out in early April, GSN will begin rerunning I've Got a Secret again, but not all of them. For reasons at which we can only guess, this time through, they'll be skipping all the episodes that were prominently sponsored by Winston cigarettes. That's an awful lot of shows to bypass but there will still be some good ones to catch again.

In the meantime, the reruns of What's My Line? are currently up to early 1962. The one that airs tonight (i.e., Monday morning) should be one with Olivia DeHaviland as the Mystery Guest. Tuesday morning, there are two Mystery Guests — Sargent Shriver (then the head of the Peace Corps) and Van Cliburn.

Deal or No Deal returns to NBC primetime with new episodes for a week commencing February 27, and then will join the weekly lineup on Monday nights. On March 3, GSN kicks off a two-day festival of old game show episodes featuring folks who won Academy Awards or hosted the ceremony often. Looks like some good things in there. Here's the schedule.

I was in the hospital when it was announced that Universal and Disney had concluded a deal that would send sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC while Disney would reacquire title to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. For those of you unfamiliar with the history or confused by some of the newspaper accounts, I'll run through it for you as briskly as possible…

In 1927, Walt Disney's business was making animated cartoons of Oswald which were distributed by Universal Pictures. A gent named Charlie Mintz was the money man and go-between. When the cartoons became successful, Walt went to New York to attempt to negotiate a new contract with Mintz at a higher fee. Instead, Mintz offered him a worse deal. What's more, Mintz informed him that he had quietly signed contracts with most of Walt's key artists — pretty much everyone except Ub Iwerks — and that Universal owned Oswald. If Walt did not accept the new terms, Mintz would set up a new studio with those artists and make the Oswald cartoons without him.

Walt did not accept the new terms. He headed back to Hollywood and, legend has it, created his replacement character on the train home. Soon, the Charles Mintz Studio was making Oswald cartoons while Walt and Ub launched the new Disney star, Mickey Mouse. It is said that Walt never quite got over the shock of losing Oswald and he also learned a valuable business lesson. Thereafter, he refused all deals that might have diluted or endangered his title to studio creations, including The Mouse. Eventually, of course, Mickey was the hottest cartoon character of all time, dwarfing the popularity of Oswald, so there was some nice revenge there. Walt got a little more when Universal later dumped Mintz and handed Oswald over to Walter Lantz…and now, with the swap for Al Michaels, the justice is more or less complete.

What interests me here is that Oswald the Rabbit has a current value in spite of over fifty years of the character's owner being utterly indifferent about the bunny. The character's popularity declined throughout the thirties and in spite of a couple of complete redesigns. In 1943, Lantz stopped making Oswald cartoons altogether, preferring to focus on his other stars, including Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker. Around this time, Lantz acquired ownership of Oswald but decades later, he sold his entire studio to Universal so they got him back. They didn't do anything with him, either. He was just a character in their merchandising catalog. When toy companies came to license Woody for some piece of merchandise, Oswald usually got tossed into the deal for nothing.

The old Oswald cartoons were rarely shown on television so for a decade or two, the only exposure the character got was in the pages of Dell Comics produced by Western Publishing. Lantz had a close relationship with Western and basically told them they could do anything they wanted with the rabbit and he would adjust his merchandising model sheets to match. As a result, he went through several more redesigns, eventually becoming a rather serious father type with two nephews, Floyd and Lloyd. It was pretty much the same relationship Mickey Mouse had with Morty and Ferdy, or that Donald Duck had with Huey, Dewey and Louie, also in Western Publishing/Dell Comics. In fact, quite a few of the scripts for the Oswald comics were revamped Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck scripts. None of the writers were too enthused over working with Oswald, so the editors would commission extra Mickey and Donald scripts and then change the names and (if necessary) the number of nephews. It was always one of their lowest-selling books.

Oswald pretty much disappeared even from the comic books in the sixties. Western had decided to give up on him before 11/22/63 but after that date, the notoriety of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald reinforced the decision. One of the editors there told me years later, "All the character was was a good name, and suddenly that name wasn't as good as before." Lantz occasionally asked Western to stick an Oswald story in the Woody Woodpecker comic book just for trademark reasons and to demonstrate that the character was still active. After Woody's comic book ended in the seventies, they didn't even have that.

So it's amazing that Oswald still has a following today. It's mostly in Japan where merchandise that harks back to the original Disney design is extremely popular…but somehow Oswald has endured and proven commercial enough that Disney wanted him back. Talk about your lucky rabbits.

Here's an article on why the current economy ain't so good despite certain indicators. And this isn't some Democrat or Liberal saying this. It's Pat Buchanan.

An outfit called Classic Comics Press has just announced that they'll be reprinting the full run of Leonard Starr's great newspaper strip, Mary Perkins On Stage. I think that's its official name. It's my understanding that some newspapers labelled it On Stage, some called it Mary Perkins and some used the double-barrelled moniker. By any handle, it's most deserving of collection.

The strip began on February 10, 1957 and ran until September 9, 1979. Some readers probably skipped it over, thinking it was just another soap opera. While it was occasionally that, Starr was quite determined to give himself something more exciting to draw than people kissing and crying. The storylines roamed the world, verging into taut adventure and intrigue, and those who followed one sequence usually got hooked and stuck with it forever — a modest but fiercely loyal readership. It also didn't hurt that Starr, along with his friend and occasional collaborator Stan Drake (The Heart of Juliet Jones) drew the best-looking women on the comic strip page. I'm looking forward to seeing them collected even though this could be another time I'm signing on to buy a series of books for many, many years.

Number one in a series.

Folks write in now and then ask me what current comics I'd recommend. There are many but today's plug is for Supernatural Law, a clever strip by the best-dressed man in comics, Batton Lash. You can experience it two ways — on paper and online — and while I prefer it on paper, the online version is free and it'll at least give you a chance to sample the exploits of Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre.

The second storyline for the webcomic, "The Life-Partner of Frankenstein," has recently been completed and can now be read in full at the Supernatural Law website. In the story, a descendant of the original Dr. Frankenstein carries on the life-creation work of his family…and we all know what trouble that always causes. In this case, the trouble is a monster named Henry, who craves a mate so Doc Frankenstein whips one up and she's named Freda but then…oh, just go read it. Don't let me spoil it for you. You'll enjoy it. Batton blends fantasy and law better than anyone this side of Justice Scalia.

I don't intend to fill this site with medical news since mine is usually just as boring as yours. However, this story is too good not to share…

This morning, I was back in an embarrassing gown at Cedars-Sinai, having a procedure which is known as an Upper G.I. Endoscopy. Basically, they knock you out and stick a little camera down your throat to check and see if all is well in your stomach. This is not as unpleasant as it sounds, it's over in a jif, and all reports from within the Evanier tummy were good news.

So it's before they wheel me in to have it done. I'm lying on a rolling hospital bed/gurney with an I.V. in one arm and a machine that constantly takes my blood pressure strapped to the other. The nurse draws the curtain back and the man on the next gurney over can see me and I can see him. He is a rather well-known TV personality-actor, and someone I have met briefly on a few occasions. He recognizes me, I recognize him. We exchange greetings and he tells me he's there for the same thing I'm there for, except that in his case, they're going in the other end.

We speak for a few more minutes and then an orderly comes and starts wheeling him off to the appropriate room. As he departs, he yells back to me, "I DON'T WANT TO READ ON YOUR WEBLOG THAT I HAD A COLONOSCOPY THIS MORNING, EVANIER! DO YOU HEAR ME? I DON'T WANT TO READ THAT ON YOUR WEBLOG!"

I haven't set foot in the place for, I'm guessing, twenty years…but I still feel a sense of loss at this news: The Old Spaghetti Factory in Hollywood is closing down this summer. It's located across the street from the KTLA TV studio where I worked a lot in the late seventies. The Old Spaghetti Factory, which was then relatively new, was a good place for lunch — decent spaghetti for a decent price in fun surroundings.

The cartoonist group I co-founded, C.A.P.S., had a banquet there once and we actually had some members complaining the food was too cheap. Our first banquet was at the Sportsmen's Lodge out in Valley and some groused that the meal was poor and that it cost too much. On both counts, they were right but there was a reason. If you go into almost any hotel and book a banquet, what your group will be served will be of lower quality than a comparable meal in the hotel coffee shop, and will cost more. So after the grousing over that event, I suggested we hold a dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was five bucks a head, I think, for a plate of spaghetti with meatballs, a salad and all the bread one could stuff — this was late seventies, remember — and everyone loved the food. I was just congratulating myself on my choice of venue when a group of members approached me and said, "You know, Mark — we're trying to elevate the image and stature of cartoonists, and it's kind of embarrassing for us to have our banquet in a place where the dinner is five dollars a plate." I shoved their faces in the lasagna and walked out.

The building up on Sunset Boulevard has a colorful history. It was originally the Los Angeles home of the Columbia Broadcasting System, back when it was just radio, back before they'd built a larger building a few blocks west on Sunset. (That building is also supposed to be demolished soon, I hear.) In 1935, CBS moved out and left behind all their equipment, which was then used by the new inhabitant — The Max Reinhardt Workshop of Stage, Screen and Radio. By the early fifties, it was a Studebaker dealership and then Gene Autry bought it and opened his TV-radio company there. When Autry moved across the street, it had a few short-term tenants before the Old Spaghetti Factory moved in with its unique style of interior decoration, complete with indoor train cars in which you can sit and swirl pasta.

Word is they'll be tearing the place down later this year to begin building condos, probably with retail stores on the ground floor. I don't understand this new trend in Los Angeles of erecting condominium complexes in commercial areas but I guess some people like living over a Walgreens in a heavy traffic area.

Yes, I know other Old Spaghetti Factories dot the landscape…although the only other one I ever went to more than once, the one right across from the convention center in San Diego, closed a year ago. But the one in Hollywood was just kind of "our place," once upon a time, and I guess I'm sorry I've neglected it all these years. Maybe I can get back there for a lunch before it all comes crashing down.

(My thanks to Jim Nestler, who's a Professor of Biology at Walla Walla College in Washington, for letting me swipe the above photo from his website. When I go up to Sunset for that lunch, I'll try and take a few of my own.)

First, the good news: I am told by one of my spies that the next service release of the TiVo software will add an undelete feature. You'll get a new folder on your screen that will say "Recently Deleted" or something of the sort, and when you delete a recording, it will go there and be recoverable until its space is needed for something else. This is a very good idea. The next service release is also supposed to incorporate some Internet-type features for those of us who have our TiVos hooked up to a high-speed Internet connection. These will include getting your local weather forecast and the ability to purchase movie tickets through your TiVo.

Bad news? There's no release date yet for the Series 3 TiVos, which will work with High-Def TV. And when they do debut, they may be without the Tivo to Go and multi-room capabilities. That might make me hold off on getting one…that is, assuming they ever come out and there isn't something better out on the market by then. So far, no one's done a personal video recorder as well as TiVo but let's not forget. There was a time not so long ago when no one had come up with a better piece of word processing software than Wordstar 4.0. Then someone did.

As we all know, some casinos have been established on ships in order to avoid anti-gambling laws. They take people out beyond the three-mile limit where the nearby authorities have no jurisdiction. Okay. Now, the question is can you trespass on copyright laws if you're out at sea and therefore not in some country that is bound by them? That's what a new lawsuit is going to try and find out.